🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018, JimP wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 06:02:12 -0400, Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 2018-08-02, ma...@mail.com <ma...@mail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 2018-08-02, Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
>>>>> On 2018-08-02, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 16:51:44 -0400
>>>>>> Michael Black <mbl...@pubnix.net> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It may actually be the same thing, an expectation of centralized
>>>>>>> computers taking care of everyone, instead of a whole lot of computers.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That is certainly the picture that appears in every science fiction
>>>>>> mention of computers pretty much right up until reality did something
>>>>>> different.
>>>>>
>>>>> And now, under reality v2.0, the wheel is coming around again.
>>>>> We're going back to centralized computers taking care of everyone
>>>>> (FSVO "care").  There are still lots of computers everywhere,
>>>>> but they're just being used as terminals.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is Facebook the present reality of Eternal September (Not the site, the present
>>>> reality of the mob of people who would discover the Internet in September.)
>>>
>>> Most of the people on FB make the "eternal September" crowd look like
>>> intellectual giants.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Look at the accusation that the Russians meddled in the election by posting
>> bogus stuff on Favebook. Who the heck gets their political information from
>> FB??? If there are many people doing this we have a lot more problems than
>> just Russians!
>
> Apparently large numbers of people get their info only from FB.
>
I think that's some of the structure.

It took me a long time to get online, but I knew about it since 1978 (Byte 
ran a series about computer networking,  which did reference arpanet, and 
there was also an article about the first small computer BBS).  I know 
every so often after I got a modem in 1985 I'd dial up a local BBS, go 
through the process of  registering, and then discover not much there, too 
small a population to be of interest to me.

But those decades, it was about talking to people I didn't know, and about 
technology.  Other than those local BBSs, there wasn't enough density in 
most places to allow for a "local", which is surely why usenet is 
organized around topics.  When I did get full internet access in 1996, it 
was still a relatively new thing, lots of people had gotten online by 
then, but it was dwarfed by those who came later.  And somewhere, there 
was a shift, people got on to do their shopping, to get their news, to 
read mail from people they knew.  They weren't interested in the wild 
world of talking to people they didn't know.

Facebook is built on the decades of "networking" in places like usenet and 
the Genie and even AOL.  But they created some different space, "cleaner" 
and also catering to a different crowd.  People who focused on "people 
they knew".

I think a lot of people don't understand, they "trust".  If someone they 
know says something, they will trust it, while if some "outsider" comes 
along and says something, even if they have longer experience on the 
topic, there's a dismissal.  "It doesn't count unless they come to the 
meetings",  except that tunes out the people who don't do well at 
meetings.

So if facebook is about giving someone a space surrounded by people they 
trust, then if something gets past the shields, it must be "trusted". 
They don't "test" things, they make an assumption, either real or fake.

Tis is hardly a knew thing.  In late 1994 I started calling BBSs and 
staying, and soon the "Good Times Virus" hit.  It was actually a warning 
message, about a computer virus that didn't exist, but written to sound 
legit, and probably worded so the less technical wouldn't try to 
understand.  The message got high travel, it was viral.  People would read 
it and pass it on.  ONe of the local alt weeklies, which was just getting 
into the online world, ran a short article about it, with a preface "we 
didn't have time to check this, but it sounds legit".  People were looking 
for secondary validity, and the message carried enough of that, so they 
didn't have to understand.

People got suckered in "the old days", all those postcards to some sick 
kid well after the fact, but in the old days some of it was filtered by 
the fact that anyone online was a subset of the general population.  Since 
it took some effort, money if nothing else but also some technical skill, 
plus desire, to get online, that filtered out the worst of it.  But at 
some point it shifted, everyone "needed" to be online, so it's no longer 
an elite.

Facebook is a success for a bunch of reasons, but one is that aparently 
there's none of that fussing html stuff.  They can slap somethign up 
whenever they want, which should have been the case since the web began, 
but I can think of lots of groups circa 1996 who missed that the internet 
was immediate, they just saw "it's too hard" and sent some stuff off to 
the website makers, which ended up in static pages.  People didn't bother 
understand, they didn't often really visit the land of the internet, so 
they came with glossy pages to attract visitors (except nobody would visit 
a site until they already knew about it, it's no magazine rack) and they 
ddin't question that making simple web pages was easy, or that the primary 
use was to spread information.

   Michael